Reviews
Empire Magazine
Dan Jolin
“A solid, often entertaining life-of-crimer which benefits from some stylistic touches and a faithful, convincing central performance.”
08/10/2010
Read Full Review
The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
“You have to take it with a pinch of salt: but it's entertaining.”
07/10/2010
Read Full Review
The Daily Telegraph
Tim Robey
“It feels like a halfway house towards mainstream recovery for a career blighted by studio frustration, but it offers something close to a career-best opportunity for Rhys Ifans, whose endearingly rumpled lead performance is thoroughly droll, reined-in, and even moving.”
07/10/2010
Read Full Review
Time Out
Ben Walters
“Rather than riotous picaresque, the result is more like a meandering shaggy dog story. Rose’s gimmicks have limited success: Marks’s pre-dope life is in black and white, and he’s often interpolated, Forrest Gump style, into archive.”
07/10/2010
Read Full Review
The Times
Kevin Maher
“Despite Thewlis, and despite the slippery moral context, Ifans alone makes this movie work. Magnetic to the end, he closes the film in fine form, with some devastating prison scenes that give Mr Nice just the right emotional heft, and prove that here, at last, is an actor who’s ready for his close-up. ”
08/10/2010
Read Full Review
Total Film
Matt Glasby
“Though Ifans excels and Omid Djalili and Crispin Glover make welcome cameos, there’s something missing: an authorial voice to pick apart Marks’ endless self-aggrandising. As such, he ends up coming across onscreen as the unlikely lovechild of Robin Hood and Andy Dufresne.”
04/10/2010
Read Full Review
The Observer
Philip French
“The film is a lighthearted, amoral comedy thriller, its opening monochrome turning to colour when Howard smokes his first spliff as an undergraduate. The writer-director Bernard Rose takes a highly indulgent view of its hero, seeing him as a modernday Robin Hood...”
10/10/2010
Read Full Review
The Sunday Times
Cosmo Landesman
“Ifans is usually such a joy to watch, but the drama here is flat and repetitive. Too much getting high, not enough story. ”
10/10/2010
Read Full Review
The Independent
Anthony Quinn
“Based on the memoirs of Welsh drug-trafficker Howard Marks, this tale of a louche life is rather like its subject – tall, self-indulgent and rather windy. Rhys Ifans brings a scapegrace charm to the role...”
08/10/2010
Read Full Review
The Financial Times
Nigel Andrews
“Why wasn’t this film wittier and more imaginatively shaped? Linear yet directionless it lollops on, Ifans’s Marks little more than a huckster in changing hairpieces who fails to sell us the appeal of the hophead counterculture.”
06/10/2010
Read Full Review
The Daily Mail
Chris Tookey
“Rhys Ifans is simply too charmless to play Marks, and director Bernard Rose's plodding screenplay is torn between making this an Ealing-style romp (but it isn't funny) and a human interest story with a sympathetic hero (except he isn't). ”
08/10/2010
Read Full Review